Deliverable Overview
You'll write one essay: an explanation of one perceptual or bodily phenomenon through Merleau-Ponty's body-subject (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012), 1,000–1,500 words long. The essay has five required components. Components 4 and 5 each offer options:
- A concrete description of the phenomenon
- Why an empiricist or mechanistic account and an intellectualist account each fall short
- An analysis through the body schema and motor intentionality
- An analysis through habit and incorporation or through the perceptual field
- One extension: others or expression, a critical-phenomenological perspective, or the late ontology of flesh
Use a section heading for each component so your analysis is easy to follow. If you cite sources, use Chicago author-date citations and include a References list. The References list doesn't count toward the word limit. Citations are optional.
Detailed Requirements
1. The Phenomenon
Describe the phenomenon concretely, before you apply any theory. Choose one you can observe or perform: learning a new skill, a perceptual illusion, using a tool, a dance step, or adapting to a new keyboard. Say what it's like from within: what you notice, what you do, what changes. A reader should be able to recognize the phenomenon from your description alone.
2. Rival Accounts and Their Shared Error
Write a short empiricist or mechanistic account of the phenomenon: one that builds it from sensations, associations, reflexes, or physical mechanisms. Write a short intellectualist account: one that explains it by attention, judgment, inference, or representation. Then show why each falls short. Name what each misses in the phenomenon as you described it. Finally, identify the error they share: both take the determinate, objective world as given and read it back into perception and action. Merleau-Ponty calls this the prejudice of the world (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, Introduction, ch. 4).
3. Body Schema and Motor Intentionality
Analyze the phenomenon through the body schema and motor intentionality. Describe the body schema as a dynamic sense of the body's position and possibilities for action, not as a map or an image. Show how movement in the phenomenon is directed at things and tasks, not at coordinates.
4. Habit and Incorporation, or the Perceptual Field (Choose One)
- Option A: Habit and incorporation. Describe how the phenomenon involves habit as a knowledge in the body, or how a tool or instrument is incorporated into the body schema, so that you perceive and act through it.
- Option B: The perceptual field. Describe how the phenomenon organizes the perceptual field: its figure and ground, its horizons, its constancies, or its indeterminate margins.
Choose the option that fits your phenomenon best. You don't need to address the other.
5. One Extension (Choose One)
- Option A: Others or expression. Extend the analysis through intercorporeality, speech as gesture, or painting and vision.
- Option B: A critical-phenomenological perspective. Extend it through Fanon's historico-racial schema (Fanon [1952] 2008, ch. 5), Young's inhibited intentionality (Young [1980] 2005), or Ahmed's orientation (Ahmed 2006a). You may use a described case rather than your own experience.
- Option C: The late ontology of flesh. Extend it through flesh, reversibility, and the chiasm.
Choose the extension that fits your phenomenon best. Use its concepts precisely.
Success Criteria
Your essay meets the requirements when it:
- Describes the phenomenon concretely, before applying theory
- Shows why both an empiricist or mechanistic account and an intellectualist account fall short, and identifies their shared error
- Analyzes the phenomenon through the body schema and motor intentionality accurately
- Analyzes it through habit and incorporation, or the perceptual field, accurately
- Extends the analysis accurately through others or expression, critical phenomenology, or flesh
- Keeps concepts precise and grounded in the phenomenon throughout
Quality Indicators
Adequate work includes all five components, gives a rival account of each kind, and uses Merleau-Ponty's concepts accurately.
Excellent work does more. It names the shared error of the rival accounts, the prejudice of the world, and shows it at work in the phenomenon. It describes motor intentionality as directed at tasks, not coordinates. Its components connect: the analysis in component 3 answers what the rival accounts missed, and the extension changes or deepens that analysis. Throughout, it describes the phenomenon as lived, rather than explaining it with neural mechanisms.
Step-by-Step Guidance
Step 1: Choose a phenomenon you can observe or perform. Pick something specific and repeatable: typing on an unfamiliar keyboard rather than "skill," or one illusion rather than "perception."
Step 2: Describe it before theorizing. Observe or perform it, and write down what it's like from within. Don't use any theoretical terms yet.
Step 3: Write short rival accounts and identify what they miss. Write a paragraph for each: a mechanistic account and an intellectualist account. Then compare each with your description, and name what it leaves out. Look for the assumption they share.
Step 4: Apply the body schema and motor intentionality. Describe how your body knows its way in the phenomenon, and what your movement is directed at.
Step 5: Choose habit or the perceptual field. If the phenomenon involves skill or a tool, choose habit and incorporation. If it turns on how things appear, choose the perceptual field.
Step 6: Choose one extension. Pick the one that fits: others or expression, a critical-phenomenological perspective, or flesh.
Step 7: Revise out causal and mechanistic language. Reread for words such as "brain," "neural," "processing," "representation," "signal," and "muscle memory." Rewrite each as a description of how the phenomenon is lived, unless you're stating a rival account.
Resources
- Component checklist. Before you finish, confirm that your essay has these headed sections:
- The phenomenon
- Rival accounts and their shared error
- Body schema and motor intentionality
- Habit and incorporation or the perceptual field
- Extension: others or expression, critical phenomenology, or flesh
- Annotated exemplar excerpt. The excerpt below shows a strong component 2 for a different phenomenon from yours: parallel parking a car. Use it as a model of stating rival accounts and naming their shared error, not as a template to copy.
A mechanistic account would say that parking is a chain of stimulus and response: the curb's image on the retina triggers a learned sequence of steering movements, reinforced over years. An intellectualist account would say that I estimate the gap's length, calculate the angle of approach, and judge when to turn the wheel. Neither matches what parking is like. I don't register a retinal image, and I don't calculate anything. I feel the car's rear corner approaching the curb, as if it were my own body's edge, and I turn when the space "looks right." Both accounts start from the same place. They assume a world of measured distances and fixed positions, and then ask how I get from that world to my movement: by association in one case, by judgment in the other. That is Merleau-Ponty's prejudice of the world. It reads the objective space of the finished world back into the parking, when what I live is a space organized by the task of fitting the car into the gap.
Annotations: The excerpt states each rival account fairly, in its own terms. It shows what each misses by returning to the description of the phenomenon. It names the shared error correctly and shows it at work in this case. It uses mechanistic vocabulary only to state the mechanistic account.
- Free refreshers.
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Merleau-Ponty covers the critique of empiricism and intellectualism, the body schema, and habit (Toadvine 2023, §3), the essays on expression and painting (§4), and the late ontology of flesh (§6).
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on bodily awareness covers the body schema and its distinction from the body image (de Vignemont 2024).
- Your own notes. You may draw on any notes or journal entries you've written as you worked through these ideas.
Tips and Common Pitfalls
- Choosing a phenomenon too broad to describe concretely. "Skill" or "perception" can't be described from within. "Learning to type on a split keyboard" can.
- Summarizing Merleau-Ponty without applying him. Defining the body schema does little. Showing it at work in a specific movement does a lot.
- Treating the body schema as a mental map. The body schema isn't a representation of the body. It's a dynamic sense of the body's possibilities for action.
- Using "flesh" to mean the body's tissue. In the late ontology, flesh is what body and world share, neither matter nor mind. If you choose that extension, use the term in that sense.
References
- Ahmed, Sara. 2006a. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Free: None for the book; see Ahmed 2006b for a free article version of its argument.
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- de Vignemont, Frédérique. 2024. "Bodily Awareness." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https\://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bodily-awareness/.
- Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
- Toadvine, Ted. 2023. "Maurice Merleau-Ponty." In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https\://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/.
- Young, Iris Marion. (1980) 2005. "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality." In On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.